Bill/Steve's Sexcellent Adventure

In six short fictional stories penned by Jezebel Slade, the long and ornery business relationship between Jobs and Gates is contrasted against their secret love affair, which is spelled out in pornographic detail.

Slash is homoerotic fan fiction that is usually written by women, for women. The stories detail erotic encounters between pop culture figures. Usually the works feature lead characters from popular movies or TV series: Spock and Kirk from Star Trek; Luke and Han from Star Wars; Mulder and Krycek from the X-Files; and Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

The term "slash" comes from the punctuation mark denoting paired lovers, as in Starsky/Hutch. Slash fiction arose in the '70s among straight female Star Trek fans who wanted to render the gay subtext between Kirk and Spock explicit through their own writings. Since then, it has flourished into a lively literary subgenre on the Net. There are dozens of sites, archiving thousands of stories.

According to her website, Slade's stories were inspired by the 1999 TNT movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, which chronicled the early history of Apple and Microsoft, personified by Jobs and Gates. Slade is at pains to point out that her fiction plays off the characters in the movie, not the real Gates and Jobs.

Slade's first story in the series, I Have What You Need, details a "missing scene" from the movie. Although it's not entirely clear from the text, the story appears to take place after Jobs shows Gates the Macintosh for the first time. Written in first-person narrative from Gates' point-of-view, Gates tells Jobs he "has what he needs." Jobs thinks it's software for the Mac, but quickly finds out Gates is referring to something else entirely.

"(Jobs) nuzzles my neck, bites my earlobe," Slade writes. "I watch him go to his desk and rummage in one of the top drawers. When he comes back, he's holding a bottle of hand lotion.... He hooks his hand on the waistband of my chinos and briefs, sliding them both down at once.... He runs his hand up my back and leans down to whisper, 'Bill, are you a virgin?'"

"Yes." Sort of.

"I'll be gentle."

The sex cements the relationship between Gates and Jobs, Apple and Microsoft. "We're compatible," the fictional Gates tells the fictional Jobs. But the sex simply lures Jobs into a false sense of security, which, of course, is exploited by Gates.

The remaining stories focus on the deteriorating business relationship between the two (Jobs accuses Gates of ripping off the Macintosh graphical operating system for Windows), and the enduring affair. Slade depicts business rows punctuated by bouts of hot, gay sex. And while Gates dominates the professional relationship, Jobs is the "top" in the bedroom.

Compared to most of the dull material published about Jobs and Gates, these stories are a rip-roaring read. But while the stories are clearly parody, Slade's choice of using real people is controversial. Slash purists insist only fictional characters should populate the canon.

"The extension of slash from fictional characters to real people would be troubling to the original fans who conceived of the genre," said Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT and an author of Textual Poachers, a book about fan literature. "They maintained very rigorous ethical norms within the community against basing the stories upon real people and their actual sexual lives."

Jenkins said as slash moved onto the Internet, the genre's conventions began to be flouted and there was a dramatic increase in stories featuring rock stars, politicians and business leaders. Examples include pro-wrestlers, boy bands like NSYNC and even the members of Metallica.

Slade could not be reached for this story.

Catherine Salmon, a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University and co-author of Warrior Lovers, a book examining slash from an evolutionary psychology perspective, said the stories were anomalous. They weren't true RPS (Real Person Slash), but stories based on real people as portrayed in a movie.

As for the choice of characters: "There's often an appeal to powerful men – most slash focuses on the male leads of action-type TV shows – and certainly the relationship between these two men has had its ups and downs, which tends to lend itself to slash, the angsty factor," she said. "But I see these stories as an odd aberration in slash – part of the recent, you-can-slash-anyone-if-you-want-to mentality that has come with the Web. They may have been done more as a lark than as a serious attempt to explore the sexual/romantic nature of two characters."